The internet is a great resource for news and updates, and no matter what you’re looking to keep track of, you’re sure to be able to find countless sites that will be able to keep you up to date with the latest information. To help make it easier to keep track of new developments, you might make use of an RSS feed to save you having to look things up manually. You might already be used to using RSS in apps like Google Reader, but there’s so much more you can do with RSS feeds.

Pipes is a tool from Yahoo that enables you to take things a step further so you can, amongst other things, create your own custom RSS feeds that pull in content from a variety of sources and filter it so that you only see the most relevant news stories. It’s a venerable web app, starting off life in a rather Google-ish way of being in a lengthy period of beta but then living on for years, long enough that many of us have likely forgotten about it. But it’s still a great tool, even in 2012, so let’s dig in and see what you can do with it.